As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.
He is literally your worst nightmare.
The Sandman has a lot of deliberate nightmare fuel. Several of its characters are nightmares, and several stories are set in nightmares — and the bits involving real people in the real world can be even worse.General
- Abel's fate of being repeatedly murdered by Cain for ages and ages. At one point, we get a description of him coming back to life with his spine still broken after Cain threw him out of the window for some perceived offense. And that doesn't even get close to the sausages scene...
- Also true from Cain's perspective — he doesn't want to kill Abel anymore, and in his own way loves his brother very much. It's a pity that You Can't Fight Fate.
- A few issues have Nightmare Fuel tailored for transgender people. In A Game of You, for instance, Wanda's nightmare about being forced into surgery. Or in A Doll's House, the page about a serial killer who targets pre-op trans people because they make him "uncomfortable."
- The deformities of the demons, particularly Mazikeen, who has half her face perpetually melted off.
Preludes and Nocturnes
- The state of John Constantine's ex, who took the satchel of dream sand. She's wasting away, skin and bones, while talking about how she was dreaming all the time and has no more desire to wake. Even Dream pities her, realizing she didn't know what she had taken, mistaking the sand for ordinary drugs, and she's dying. Dream says he can't save her, but he does give her a pleasant Dying Dream as thanks for John Constantine helping him.
- The dream sand also warps the house around her. A burglar has his mind eaten by dreams, and Rachael's own father somehow ends up turned inside out, spread across several walls, and is still alive.
- John Constantine is in quite a bad state himself. The only thing he asks as a reward from Dream for being fully cooperative and doing everything in his power to help him? Stop the nightmares for a little while. One good night of sleep would be enough. After what happened in Newcastle...
- The Sandman #6, "24 Hours". John Dee, aka Doctor Destiny, was a somewhat campy Justice League supervillain who controlled people's dreams and emotions with a special ruby, but he dropped off the radar for about five years in the '80s. In Gaiman's revisiting of the character, we learn that his dream powers have robbed him of his own ability to sleep, and he's withered away into a shriveled wretch. He spends the first five issues getting out of Arkham Asylum through no effort of his own and wandering around being creepy, but not nightmare-inducingly so. But then he gets his old ruby out of storage. He walks into a diner — after casually murdering the woman who gave him a ride — and proceeds to use his powers again, bringing out the negative emotions of the six people in the diner with him. It starts with simple aggression and proceeds to graphically-depicted physical violence and willing torture, with the six eventually murdering each other for Dee's pleasure. Dee eventually starts manipulating everyone in the world the same way, but this is actually less horrific because it isn't shown directly. (We do see a kid's show recommending that the viewers all slit their wrists... along the arteries, to make it impossible for them to be bandaged up. Luckily, we don't see any kids actually do this.). It's not at all different in concept from the kind of things supervillains do in regular comics, but it's drawn so graphically.
- This story takes place in the DC universe (or at least a version of one). The Justice League and Justice League International are mentioned several times. Throughout this crisis, the news reports say that they were unavailable for comment. Destiny was hiding out in a diner ripping the minds of everyone in the world to shreds, and the Justice League either couldn't find a way to stop him or succumbed to his power.
- Doctor Destiny going berserk with Dream's ruby in the Dreaming destroying everything before absorbing Dream into it, and then preparing to destroy the ruby. We get an Early-Bird Cameo by Destiny, and the narration tells us that he's afraid to turn the page in his book to find out the outcome.
- Those diners? At one point, Dee restores their sanity, while keeping them fully aware of everything he's done to them.
- In the end, John Dee accidentally restores Dream's powers by destroying his ruby. Dream thanks him for doing that, and also condemns him for how he used his power in such a mindless, murderous way. What is John Dee's punishment? Dream... escorts him back to Arkham, reassuring the other inmates that the man is powerless now and returning "home". That's it for a guy that caused mass murder and an apocalypse. (No wonder he appreciated Scarecrow's April Fools gag of an orderly strung up and left for dead.)
- Nightmare fuel involving actual nightmares: Morpheus's 'Eternal Waking' curse from early on in the series, which condemns Alex Burgess to be trapped in his own dreams — constantly dreaming that he'd just woken up from a nightmare, only to have the 'reality' he'd woken into rapidly turn into another nightmare, from which he would 'wake up' again, only for it to dissolve into horror and nightmare again, and so on and on. Forever. He gets better after five years when Dream dies. He may have deserved it for continuing to keep Dream prisoner and causing the global Sleeping Sickness, but damn.
- The fact that Unity was raped while suffering from the sleeping sickness resulting from Dream's imprisonment (with the girl she gave birth to being given up for adoption). What's worse is that she initially thought she had just dreamed about giving birth to a baby upon waking up.
- "The Sound of Her Wings":
- A comedian is riffing on Batman, and the audience is eating it up. Death watches with a sad smile. Cue an electric discharge from the microphone killing the poor woman, who goes down screaming. Her ghost tells Death that it's every comedian's fear to die onstage.
- A mom is fussing over her baby and goes to get a bottle of formula. Death goes and picks up the child, who asks, "Is that all there is?" She apologizes and says yes. Cue the mother coming back, cooing to her baby. After realizing the child is still, she goes Oh, Crap!, drops the bottle, and runs to the crib.
- The soccer player from the start of the story praises Dream and Death's athletic skills, inviting them to play. They politely decline, though Death says that she'll see him soon. Cue the boy running into the street to chase the ball...
Doll's House
- The prologue has a "Just So" Story, where one elder explains to a boy the story of Nada, a powerful queen, attracting the king of Dream's attractions. Rather than be flattered, her first response was to run away from him, change his shape, and mutilate her "maidenhead" so that he wouldn't take her. Dream persisted, wearing down her defenses, and she consents... only to see her kingdom under fire and destroyed. Mortals and deities can't intermingle, or there will be disaster. Nada kills herself out of guilt and refuses Dream's offer to stay in his land. So he condemns her to hell. For ten millennia. Because a woman refused him.
- Issue one of the arc opens with Desire revealing to Despair that the Nada scheme was theirs (Desire's). They did it to purely make Dream suffer and break the rules. Desire dismisses Nada as a "mistake".
- Pretty much anything dealing with the Corinthian, especially his first version. The concept of him being a nightmare personified and the sounds he makes when he eats things with his other mouths are disturbing.
- What criticism did Neil receive for this arc? Not the serial killer convention, the Corinthian, or the nudity; it was the all-too-real child abuse that Rose's brother Jed receives from their aunt and uncle. The narration reveals that after he attempted to run away, they keep him locked up in the basement without a toilet and barely any food, just keeping him alive for the foster care money. Rats are free to feast on him when he's sleeping. When they do let him out, it's to beat him into submission so that he'll keep his mouth shut when social workers come.
- Rose has spent the whole story tracking down Jed, and it's implied her impending visit is what motivated his foster aunt and uncle to beat him up onscreen. She then learns from the police that the house is in shambles, the relatives are dead, and Jed is missing. The police also find evidence that he was abused, from the urine in the corner to the padlock on the basement door. She has a Thousand-Yard Stare while talking to Gilbert, and asks who would dare treat her little brother like an animal? Why would anyone hurt an innocent kid?
- Brute and Glob knew that Jed had some affinity for dream magic. Rather than help him escape his situation, they create a dreamworld in his head where a living soul, Hippolyta Hall, and her dead husband, the Golden Age Sandman Hector Hall, served as the guardians of sorts. A part of Hippolyta suspects this is Too Good to Be True, since she hasn't aged in decades, but the spell on her wipes her mind and makes her vapid. Then Dream appears, destroys the house in his attempt to figure out what this anomaly is, and makes everyone wake up. He banishes Brute and Glob for using Jed's mind, and tells the "little ghost" Hector that his time on Earth is up and sends him to the afterlife. Imagine Hippolyta's situation: she wakes up from a Silver Age utopia in a dirty basement that stinks of human waste, and her husband "dies" before her eyes. Then Dream says her baby is actually his child, and he'll claim it one day.
- The serial killer convention is full of Fridge Horror and just-plain-in-your-face horror.
- An investigative reporter named Philip Gist tries to infiltrate the convention. The Doctor susses out that he's a fake when questioning him about his murders, because he knows that the real Bogeyman was killed a few months ago. When his cover is blown, four of the killers knock him out and take him for a ride. The Corinthian describes the various mutilations and cannibalistic quirks of his fellow murderers, and then tells the reporter, "Now we're going to take turns."
- The Corinthian is keeping "Something in the trunk for later". It's revealed that when Jed hitched a ride from him, the Corinthian knocked him out and put him in the trunk. (Fortunately, Gilbert realizes who the man is and what he had done, and rescues Jed.)
- The speech he gives before a hotel meeting room full of serial killers, stating that what they do is the real meaning of the American dream, because they 'kill to kill' rather than for a legitimate reason. He seems so God-damn proud.
- There's Dog Soup, a woman who looks like she could be a CEO. She says her goal is to rise above the stereotypes of Nurse Ratchets and black widows.
- Some of the other serial killers are also notable, such as Fun Land, the serial killer who lurks in amusement parks so he can target children, and who shows up to the convention wearing a not-Mickey Mouse hat with pointed ears and a T-shirt with a cartoon wolf, tying in to the Little Red Riding Hood theme.note
- Fun Land mentions, with a dreamy smile, that he does all of his killing in a large, unnamed theme park, crowded enough that families have trouble keeping track of their children, but secluded enough in certain places that the kids aren't found until it's too late — and that the park management just covers up what he does rather than go to the authorities. They know he's there, lurking in a giant trap that they've created, and, because they're afraid of the negative publicity, they not only let him stay, but become complicit in his crimes. He concludes by saying that they want everyone to be happy there, including him.
- The Doctor has a little hobby: making his own leather neckties. It's implied in A Game of You that he killed Maisie's grandchild, who was trans, and ran away from home.The Doctor has treated Presidents. He's pioneered radical new operations — some with startling success. He's saved many lives.
He collects leather neckties. They wrote about it in the New York Times.
He has over a hundred.
He makes them himself. - Morpheus' reaction upon finding the Corinthian reveling in the horrific crimes he has committed and inspired? Disappointment at the wasted potential, because he had intended for the Corinthian to be so much worse.
- Corinthian challenges Dream to fight him and show how powerful he is as a nightmare. Dream gives him a contemptuous look. Then he unmakes the nightmare, with just a flick of his hand, and proceeds to break the spell on the serial killers. He tells them they are monsters, not glory-seekers, and they should go home and think about their lives. Everyone does, including the man who said he was looking for help because he had lost control of his homicidal tendencies.
- Fun Land attempts to assault and murder Rose, despite the fact that she's nineteen and way older than his usual targets. (It's implied that Desire being Rose's grandparent has something to do with this unnatural attraction.) He lies to her that he has a message from her grandmother as a pretext to enter her hotel room, and starts strangling her. Rose, fortunately, saves herself by reciting Morpheus's name from the piece of paper that Gilbert gave her, and Dream shows up, puts Fun Land to sleep, and orders her semiconscious self to get out of the hotel and away from these monsters.
- Gilbert's Oh, Crap! when Matthew tells him Rose is the Vortex. He's spent the night by Jed's hospital bed, for Rose's sake, but he grabs his hat and cane. When Matthew asks why, Gilbert says, per the rules of Dream's duties, "He'll have to kill her."
- When Rose starts causing a literal Dream Apocalypse, nearly everyone in her complex is affected, as sleep activates her powers. Barbie and Ken find their dream worlds merging, Chantal and Zelda cling to each other while frightened, and Hal is left on a barren cliff. He calls for Rose, having recognized this was her doing, but is asking where she is. Dream, fortunately, interferes and helps Rose control it long enough to explain the situation to her. He says he has to kill her because if the Vortex had gone further, she would have killed everyone on the planet.
Dream Country
- All of "Calliope".
- A hotshot writer with one book finished and another nine months overdue buys a muse from his favorite writer. That's Not Hyperbole; he secures ownership of the muse Calliope, who is bound to obey his orders and provide ideas. When Richard Madoc rapes her, he has no conscience about it, because he says she's not human. In fact, when considering that he may have been scammed, his bigger concern is thinking that he'll get in trouble for the crime. Calliope sends out distress signals, but because Madoc and her previous captor followed the rules, the only one who could save her is her ex, Oneiros aka Dream. But he's in captivity as well, and besides, they had a bad breakup. Calliope desperately says to send anyone, "even Oneiros", as Richard comes to rape her again.
- This issue is a direct lesson on why you should never lie to Dream or abuse his exes. Richard comes home to find a strange man sitting on his couch. He goes Oh, Crap! and tries to demand the stranger to leave before he calls the cops. Dream gets to the point: Richard is holding a woman captive, and Dream would like for Richard to let her go. At first, Richard tries to deny it, only to say he needs to hold onto her for longer to get ideas. Dream gets furious and says that Calliope is no one's plaything, and certainly not one for a mere, petty mortal. He curses Richard with an abundance of ideas so that he is compelled to write them at once or they'll flood his mind. It gets to the point where he writes with his bleeding fingers on the wall, all the way down to the bone. When freed, Calliope asks Dream to take pity on Richard since it's gone on long enough for him to get the point.
- However, Dream's mercy may well be crueler and more terrible than his wrath, as Dream not only withdraws his "Ideas In Abundance", but all of the ideas that Richard had or would ever have, as Richard states that he can't think of anything. Anything at all. Richard will never have another idea for as long as he lives.
- Richard goes to Calliope and asks what the strange man did to him as the ideas invade his mind. Calliope looks at him with pity. Then she explains that the man was Oneiros, the god of dreams and the father of their son. Richard then says in a small voice, "I didn't know you ever had a son." It's then that he and the reader learn that he never treated Calliope as an actual person, or understood she may not be real, but she was real enough to him.
- "Dream of a Thousand Cats":
- The worries that the cat prophet describes: she had a litter of kittens with a stray that had no interest in being a father. Her humans weren't into it, so they grabbed her babies, put them in a sack, and drowned them. They claimed that she wouldn't feel anything because she was a cat and their pet. This cemented the cat's hatred of humans.
- Dream took pity on the cat, feeling her grief. He can't break the rules and revive the dead, or change how people are. What Dream can do, however, is give the cat a dream: of a world where cats were once bigger than humans and ruled over them. Humans in that realm apparently dreamed enough of reversing the roles to create our world, and Dream claims if enough cats do the same, then the cat will have her kittens back. The cat then spends the rest of her life spreading the word to many cats and kittens. Imagine how one dream can have that much power.
Season of Mists
- The entire thing with the Boarding School of the Damned. Childhood abandonment issues and problems with school settings, back to play. All standard fare until the dead start coming back to life, specifically three older students who died in World War One, discussing how life isn't fair — and how they did the whole Satanic-rite thing, killed another student and drank the blood and everything, and when they died, Hell didn't care. Their last panel in the story implies that two are in the process of sodomizing the third.
- Some of the denizens that try to buy Hell from Dream are frightening. The embodiment of chaos is a little girl, who cheerfully threatens Dream that if he doesn't give her the key, she'll destroy everything in the Dreaming. (We find out she was bluffing; when he gives the key to the angels, she's a Graceful Loser and says that was a fair loss.) Meanwhile, two demons have taken Nada hostage and have her tied up in a compromising position.
A Game Of You
- The horrific cannibal zombie baby from Hazel's nightmare.
- Hazel reveals that she got drunk and hooked up with a similarly intoxicated guy despite being in a committed relationship with Foxglove. This ends with her pregnancy, with a baby neither she nor her girlfriend can afford. While she takes full responsibility and apologizes to Foxglove for cheating on her, she wasn't able to give consent. It just goes to show how one mistake can change your life and potentially ruin a relationship.
- George's fate, and even Wanda is so grossed out she spends a long time throwing up in the toilet. Thessaly realizes that George sent nightmares in crow form to kill everyone in the building, including her; she was immune to it, so she killed the bird, went to George's apartment with a knife, and left him to bleed out in the bathtub. She coolly tells her aghast neighbors that George deserved it for trying to kill her. To make matters worse, she needs information, so she gouges out his eyes, cuts off his ears, peels off his face, and rips his tongue out with her teeth to nail them all to the wall. George is writhing in agony as she revives him and demands to know who sent this assassination attempt. He only dies for good when the building collapses.
- Barbie is led to believe that the Cuckoo is a malevolent force and a typical Big Bad that can be beaten with righteousness. Instead... the Cuckoo is a doppelganger of her childhood self, but with no empathy or love for the Land, or for real life. It compels her friend Luz to betray Barbie, and later influences Barbie to destroy the Land by tossing the Porpentine over the horizon. Dream later explains that Cuckoos are creations of the Dreaming that go into a world, grow up in it, and can only leave after destroying it. In short, she was acting exactly how she was supposed to, and while Dream could kill her to avenge the Land if Barbie wished it per her boon, he advises Barbie that it would be a foolish idea. The only consolation that Barbie gets out of it is that the Cuckoo has to make her own way in the Dreaming when she decides to use the boon to save herself and her friends, getting them home safely.
- Thanks to Thessaly summoning the Moon Path, a deadly hurricane hits New York City. There's a brief Hope Spot that the apartment building will hold when Wanda braves the storm to rescue the homeless woman she saw earlier, who reveals her name is Maisie, and they talk about their lives. George, nailed to the wall, realizes that the building won't hold and warns them. Wanda gets killed as the building collapses, and Maisie sacrifices her life shielding Barbie's prone body.
- Wanda's eventual fate — buried as a man, under her deadname, by her family that had abandoned her for being transgender. Barbie has a dream that she gets better, though, entering the afterlife as her ideal, undeniably female self.
Fables and Reflections
- Orpheus's graphic dismemberment by the Maenads pulls no punches in what happens to him as they devour and tear him apart, and the worst thing is that his head is still alive. He begs his father for mercy, but Morpheus walks away without looking back, leaving Orpheus as a disembodied head for centuries.
Brief Lives
- Ruby's dead body when she's set on fire thanks to Destruction's booby traps. Goes into Tear Jerker territory when you read that this girl had goals.
- The worst part of Brief Lives is the flashback to the plague. A man's entire family is dead around him from the black death, and he's trapped inside his house because the neighbors nailed the door shut while they were still in it. He's passed out drunk (what else to do in that situation), and everyone thinks he's dead.
"He would come to his senses in the early hours of the next morning, in the plague pit, with soft earth on his face, and cold flesh beneath him, and believe himself in hell."- Delirium, after being pulled over by a cop for driving... well, deliriously, decides to punish him, saying: "I think you'll have invisible insects all over you now for all your life and for ever and always." Which then happens. We later see the same man in an insane asylum, clenching his eyes and mouth closed for fear of invisible bugs walking over his eyeballs or slithering into his mouth. Of course, his nostrils are still fair game. When Dream indicates that he feels the Disproportionate Retribution was a little harsh, Delirium retorts that Dream has done "…lots worse than that. Anyway. Lots and lots and lots and lots and lots."
World's End
- On the ship, Hob Gadling talks with the sailor Jim and an Indian traveler. The Indian traveler retells the story of how Vikramaditya's brother gave up his throne; a wise old mystic gave a round fruit to the king of his land, saying that it would provide immortality and eternal youth. When the king was about to eat it, he remembered a vow that he would not outlive his wife, and gave her the fruit, asking her to be young and beautiful forever. She gave it to a lover, who in turn gave it to his lover, who in turn took it to the king. Through this, the king discovers that his wife was cheating on him and squandered the gift, which ironically remained uneaten the whole time; while Indian readers may know that in Amar Chitra Katha the king asked his brother Vikramaditya to take the throne and that's where his tale ends, Neil goes further. The king describes how he personally executed his wife and her paramour, stripping the former naked, before eating the fruit and going into exile. Jim the sailor boy protests and says that's a bit beyond the pale for adultery. The Indian man, implied to be the king, admits that Jim may have a point, but hindsight is 20/20.
- Boss Smiley from the Prez Rickard story. The first few times we see him, he's a guy in a suit with a round face shaped like a smiley badge. When we see him on his own turf, his head actually is an enormous sphere with a widely distorted, perpetually smiling mouth. It's a toss-up which is creepier.
- The story also has the all-too-real tragedy of a random woman kills Prez's fiancee, and would have killed Prez as well if he had been unluckier. She apparently thought that shooting them would get the celebrity Ted Grant's attention, a take on John Hinckley's attempted assassination of Reagan to impress Jodie Foster. Despite his grief, he argues to the court that she's not well and deserves mercy, not execution. He fails, and Boss Smiley later gloats that it was one of his plans to punish Prez for refusing to serve him.
The Kindly Ones
- Whoever kidnapped Daniel was able to knock out Rose, who was babysitting him. Remember that Rose is Desire's granddaughter, and has the ability to compel others to feel attracted to her unconsciously. That Loki was powerful enough to do that shows how much of a threat he is.
- The Three in their most vengeful form, particularly in the last panel of issue #63.
- For that matter, the Three, after spending the entire series as benevolent mentors, take on their role as the Kindly Ones without noticeably changing their personalities.
- When the Kindly Ones finally meet Dream. Dream has survived imprisonment and assassination attempts and stared down Lucifer. He visibly shrinks back in dread from the Kindly Ones.
- Loki's eventual fate. It's bad enough that he had already been tied to a rock with his own son's entrails and had a snake drip poison on his face, but after he escapes, he gets his neck snapped and his eyes torn out by the Corinthian. Loki is tough: this doesn't kill him. When Odin and Thor find him, they tie him back onto the rock, still with his snapped neck and lack of eyes, and the snake carries on dripping poison on his face. Into his empty eye sockets.
- When Delirium talks to Mazikeen, the demon with the half-melted face who is utterly devoted to Lucifer. After she refuses to help Delirium, Delirium says that she will make Mazikeen an ugly demon who is hopelessly devoted to her boss, and then make it so that's what she always was. This is who that character was every time we saw her. So did Delirium retcon this character into what she now is? Completely destroy her identity, both in comic and out? Or is she just messing with us, the readers?
- In the end, the reader never finds out who hired Loki to kidnap Daniel and ostensibly set him on fire so that he could become the new Dream. While Dream is the most likely candidate, given he asked Loki for a favor in exchange for sending a dream in his place to suffer his punishment, Desire is also a possibility. After all, Desire said on a regular basis that they wanted Dream dead. They also tried to invoke the blood clause before. Either way, their actions wreak complete destruction in the Dreaming.
- Loki kills the woman who is Hippolyta's roommate. Why? Just because he felt like it, making her burn alive after making her believe he was holding a gun to intimidate her.
The Sandman Presents
- The Sandman Presents: The Furies is drawn in a photorealistic painting style, which makes the surreal images and Body Horror even more unsettling than usual, especially when Kronos conjures up writhing, quadrupedal reptilian monsters that have Lyta Hall's face in an attempt to take over the Furies' position.
